Custom Authenticator

Troubleshooting
1

Hi,

I am planning to write a custom authenticator for Mattermost (in fact my requirement was to use Atlassian Crowd authenticator). Any hints or guidelines about how to go about these changes? (is there a plugin architecture by which the authenticator can be plugged in)

-Renjith

2

Hi @vrenjith,

First, thank you again for your work on the Jira integration for Mattermost and the team merge project. Your work is really wonderful.

Regarding auth add-ons, there’s been long discussion on this and the feature is out-of-scope for Team Edition for a few reasons:

  1. Authentication is a critical path that needs to be tested, maintained and supported with each monthly release and volunteers aren’t prepared to bear the tax this change would impose on them, and

  2. Such a change increases the difficulty of creating high quality apps and drivers, as developers would be taxed with requests for support, troubleshooting, and debug set ups that would be expensive to reproduce.

Also, millions of people use Slack with username and password and they give up control of their data to use the “free” version. Mattermost as an open source alternative to users of proprietary SaaS products.

We’re asking community members to help add features to speed this transition–features like your Jira-Mattermost integration, more keyboard shortcuts, more slash command options, plus dozens of smaller improvements.

The concern with auth add-ons is that they’ll hurt the momentum of the project–adding a monthly tax on volunteers to test, maintain and support features that require complicated set ups, and taxing 3rd party developers.

You’ve contributed a lot to the community so far, I hope you’ll consider continuing. I hope we can create enough value that your teammates will enjoy Mattermost even without auth add-ons,

1 Like
3

Thank you Ian for the response.
One question: Will I be going against usage terms if I customize the mattermost (platform) code, compile and use it?

4

There aren’t any terms preventing you from compiling and using the platform source code. That said, to apply the latest security updates added to master you would need to manually merge your fork.

1 Like
5

@vrenjith, I have the idea to use the gitlab auth of the Team Edition for an OAuth login Plugin for Crowd.
Are you interested to share ideas and maybe work out a solution together?
cheers
Carsten